I have a new install of LMDE but there are no updates, it seems that it is a kind of odd. It is a rolling distribution like Gentoo. I had Gentoo in 8 years. But now I want to try LMDE that I heard a lot of good things about.

What repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list should it point to if I want updates?

I use LMDE64 and installed it after the UP4 release. To morrow Wheezy will be freezed for six or seven months. Will LMDE users get an UP5 in the next two months or will they have to wait till 2013? Wheezy underwent some noticeable changes (Gnome 3.4) which have not yet been replicated by LMDE. Is Cinnamon adaptation the reason for slowing so much the update process ?

Good question roger64! I waited to give LMDE a try unit LM13 hit to hopefully get a common starting point with my wife's PC (LM13 is on it) I was very surprised to see LM13 with many more current packages than LMDE. Mainly gnome-shell 3.4 and similar. It would be great to know when UP5 (assuming it contains 3.4) is planned. Otherwise I may have to switch back for my own sanity.

To be honest, I am still getting my head wrapped around this LMDE semi-rolling update thing. I guess I was expected something more frequently as well, but I admittedly grew up on Gentoo. To that note, I do appreciate the stability as well.

I've just read on LM blog a comment of Clem: once Maya Xfce and KDE will be released (a matter of days), he will prepare UP5 for LMDE. The Xfce version will get 4.10. So hopefully, the Gnome Cinnamon version will get 3.4 but he did not say it explicitely. Should happen probably during the second half of July. Probably.

I sincerely surprised that version of LMDE, provided that no update was released today and reinstalled LMDE to my biggest surprise is that just keeps updating firefox and thunderbird after installing the apt-get dist-upgrade.

Sorry for my comment but LMDE is very strange in the least and I agree with the author of the topic.

amandus wrote:I have a new install of LMDE but there are no updates, it seems that it is a kind of odd. It is a rolling distribution like Gentoo.

Wrong..... LMDE is a so called Semi-rolling distro and it works with Update Packs (UP's) which are tested carefully through the Incoming repo before being released/pushed to the Latest repo.
So... LMDE doesn't get constant updates like other rolling release distro's that are out there. The latest Update Pack was UP4 which is already included. A few updates might come sometimes but not always like FireFox and Thunderbird for example.

It just can't be compared with a true rolling distro like Gentoo, Arch or Sabayon for example. Simple as that.

Also the main focus of the Mint team is on the Main Linux Mint releases which have the priority. With the Main releases I mean Mint 13 MATE and Cinnamon, KDE and Xfce.

I hope that this explains things a bit for the people who still don't know how LMDE works or wonder why there are no updates coming in.

I use LMDE on my machines that can't afford to be broken with pure Debian Testing (not that it's ever happened, but still).

I use apt-pinning to get the newer packages I may need (such as Iceweasel 13 from experimental), but I love the idea of LMDE. It keeps the libraries and base system updated. These aren't things that I necessarily need cutting-edge, but are important for installing newer packages. Before I updated my Squeeze machines, I wasn't able to install the newer versions of Pithos and Pidgin that I wanted, without a huge system upgrade.

LMDE and the UPs keep that from being a problem through thoughtful, and slightly more stable, upgrades.

Don't look at the Download page that states: "LMDE constantly receives updates".
That applied for the very first LMDE releases, the UP's came later. So that means that the page must be edited because it is a bit confusing that way.

UP's contain more up to date packages to let LMDE look and act like the Main Mint Cinnamon/MATE Editions. Including improvements and features.

The UP's were actually scheduled once a month but that never really happened because there was some problem with a package, if i remember correct, in Debian testing back then that caused more trouble than needed. So the Mint team decided to wait, they want to push out stable UP's in the end.

For the rest of the questions you could do some more research yourself on the Blog and the forum about LMDE. Most questions are already covered in various topics.

Mr. B wrote:
The UP's were actually scheduled once a month but that never really happened because there was some problem with a package, if i remember correct, in Debian testing back then that caused more trouble than needed. So the Mint team decided to wait, they want to push out stable UP's in the end.

Some problems with MESA - nVidia/ATi drivers, a bit rough usage of UUID in the fstab, and of course, Gnome 3. That last paused LMDE on UP 3 for months, waiting for Gnome 3 to stabilize, Cinnamon to improve, MATE to implement...